Dark Habits is a website geared towards witchcraft, art, music, social and queer justice.

I’ve been a practitioner of witchcraft since I was 14, but a lover of all things Witch since early childhood. My favorite book was The Witch Who was Afraid of Witches by Alice Low (with wonderful illustrations by Karen Gundersheimer). I identified with the baby witch, who didn’t really quite fit in – always a weirdo (a word I use and label I wear with pride) – as a queer witch growing up in Kansas in the 90s, that outsider identity only felt more acutely still. Like almost all baby witches at the time, I discovered Wicca and Tori Amos. I found a place I belonged in witchcraft and the arts.

I began to feel disenchanted with the trappings of 90s-era paganism. When I entered college, started to further develop my feminism and getting involved in riot grrrl, I drifted away from the heteronormative, binarily gendered paganism of the late 90s/early 00’s.  It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago in the mid-00s and started working at a candle shop that I came back around to witchcraft. My manager/best friend – a badass witchy woman – and I started talking about witchcraft, then practicing it. She showed me another way to Witch and helped me reawaken my witchy ways. It was during this time that one of our (all male) candle makers bemoaned our penchant for playing ‘witchy music’ too much. Something clicked, and I realised that my favorite genre of music actually was witchy music. I do not use this to belittle or insult. Like ‘weirdo’, I see it as a marker of different ways art can be crafted into magical intentions, with or without the creator intentionally doing so. Magick and all forms of creative expression are symbiotic. Magick is often described as desire made manifest.

 Dark Habits views all creative endeavors as magic made manifest.

Dark Habits seeks to carve out this little corner of the Internet to share interpretations, practices and experiments in witchcraft – solitary or in a coven of like-minded others. DH seeks to investigate practices and people who are redefining and exploring the intersections of magick, queer identity, feminism and marginalized identities.

Magick and art create space for transformation, societal change and untapped potential. Dark Habits focuses on those who identify as practitioners (or not) who somehow incorporate magick and transformation in their work, which is inherently magical. This is a space where readers can come to explore witchcraft in all its forms without being potentially questioned or mocked; where gender, ethnic background and all forms of sexuality is implicitly embraced.

As I write this, we are experiencing a time of unprecedented change the likes of which have not been seen. The world is going through a seismic shift at all levels, and now is the boundless beginnings of coming together and creating a space to nurture and grow. Dark Habits is queer at its core. My vision is to break through the gender binary surrounding paganism to explore realms of fluidity at the heart of a queer approach. The future is non-binary, hurry up, let’s get going.

Megan MoonBat, curator